[Histonet] Preserving brain tissue for transport

[Angelina Fong]

Hi everyone,

What would be the best medium to preserve and transport small pieces of 
brain tissue in for a prolonged period of time without ruining the 
tissue or the antigenicity?

To give you some background to this question - I will be travelling to a 
lab in Australia to do some experiment and at the end of each 
experiment, I would like to fix and preserve the tissue for subsequent 
whole mount immunohistochemistry or ISH.  However, I need to bring the 
tissue back to my lab here in Canada to process.  So I will need to fix 
and store the tissue for an indefinite period of time.  I am wondering 
what would be the solution to store the tissue in for that period of 
time.  Previously, I have stored fixed brain tissue from adult rats in 
PBS for weeks.  However, this lot of tissue will be very small (neonates 
and embryos), so I am concerned the tissue will become 'unfixed'. But if 
I leave it in the fix, I'm concerned it will become overfixed ...

Does anyone have any suggestions for what I should do?

Thanks in advance.

Angelina